1. Field of the Invention
The invention is directed to information systems and, more particularly, to the indication of broken and healed hypertext links in a network, such as the World Wide Web.
2. Description of Related Art
Large information networks, such as the World Wide Web are well-known in the art. Documents stored in such an information system contain hypertext links to related information.
3. The Problems
Navigating information systems such as the World Wide Web by using links can be a frustrating experience because many of these weblinks are "broken", that is, they do not connect the user to the intended destination page. Instead, users receive an error message, such as "file not found." Such errors create a suboptimal user experience when using these information systems.
Solving this problem is not easy. It is a time consuming and tedious job for the authors or maintainers of web pages to continually verify that all of the links in all of their documents are working.